Now, as you have all gathered by now, I LOVE a conspiracy, and the Titanic is teeming with them as are most maritime disasters. My love for the Titanic (or fear, should I say) started when I was about 12/13 possibly younger. I was on a ship with my grandparents and my mom going to Belgium, when my grandad picked up a book about ships and bought it for me. Laying in the tiny cabin bed (it was tiny because I was a chubby child), I opened the pages and was welcomed to the book by a lovely paragraph on the Titanic… I can tell you, targeting that book for a child on a boat was not a good idea. I wondered as the lifeboat hit against the side of the ship, and the waves crashed up, if my heart would indeed go on and we would indeed make it to Belgium or end up like the famous cruise liner. Anyway, once again, I digress from the real reason why I am writing and you are reading this blog! Let’s sink our sterns into the story of the Titanic.

“The maiden voyage of the White Star liner Titanic, the largest ship ever launched, has ended in disaster.”

– The Guardian April 16^th 1912.

Our journey with the Titanic starts in March 1909, in Belfast, Ireland, where the unsinkable ship was being built. The Cunard line had already been building famous ships like the Lusitania and the Maurentania, and was winning records for the fastest speed and now it was the White Star Line’s turn. White Star knew they had to pull this out the water. They knew they could build faster ships than Cunard and unveiled three new ocean liners, Titanic, Olympic and Brittanic.

The Titanic was being built in the shipyard, next to the Olympic for two-years. They were both designed mostly by Thomas Andrews (Harland and Wolff) and were absolutely huge in interior and exterior. The Titanic included 3 passenger areas, a first class, second class and third class, 4 lifts, a massive dining room for all the first class guests and even a swimming pool [that is still full even today]. The hull of the Titanic broke records as the largest movable manmade object in the world at the time and 100,000 people are estimated to have watched the hull be launched into the River Lagan. The ship had 29 boilers! 29! And included 2 main steam engines. The ship had 16 compartments, all of which included doors that you could close from the bridge, just in case water was getting in through the hull. We are then lead to the worst thing that anyone involved in the ship building could have done, they presumed… The bulkheads were presumed to be watertight, but they were not capped at the top (another design fault). This was due to the builders claiming that four of the 15 compartments could be flooded without the liner’s buoyancy being affected, as the water would hopefully flow into the 4 compartments and even itself out. This was how the ship became “unsinkable”.

 Another design fault with the Titanic, was the amount of lifeboats, or lack thereof. 16 boats for only 1,178 passengers and crew; 2,229 people were on the Titanic the night it sank. The real shocker of this one, is that back in the day, the liner’s lifeboat number was actually more than the British Board of Trade required.

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The day of departure The ship departed from Southampton, England on April 10^th 1912 and went on its way to New York. The ship was captained by Edward J. Smith. There were quite a few celebrities on the ship: John Jacob Astor IV (the wealthiest of the passengers) the owners of Macy’s, Isidor Straus, and his wife Ida and wealthy widow and heiress Margaret “Molly” Brown.

As the ship departed it was met with bad luck, besides nearly colliding with a small boat, a small coal fire was burning in one of the bunkers, the Captain and chief engineer both agreed damage to the ship was unlikely and it was more than likely not going to affect the hull [Famous Last Words]. New evidence and a small conspiracy theory by Titanic experts suggests that, the fire was out of control just after they left Southampton forcing the crew to attempt a full-speed crossing, meaning that they had to go quicker than was recommended, to get to America safely and is later said to have weakened the hull, causing the iceberg to be able to damage the ship worse.

On April 14^th, 4 days into the trip to the “American dream”. The trip, looked like it was finally going smoothly. The Atlantic Daily Bulletin (the Titanic’s newspaper) was uneventful and the passengers seemed to be enjoying themselves. Ice-warnings had been issued to the Titanic from other ships, but the crew weren’t worried; the seas were smooth and the sky looked clear. At 11:40pm, the lads on the bridge saw an iceberg and shouted down to change the course, but it was too late, the Titanic hit the iceberg.

“Late last night the White Star officials in New York announced that a message had been received stating that the Titanic sank at 2.20 yesterday morning after all her passengers and crew had been transferred to another vessel.”

The Guardian April 15th 1912

The Titanic hit the iceberg travelling 22 knots (just to put it in perspective, a plane today travels at about 500 knots). This may not seem that fast, but it was high-speed for a ship. The 25mph that it was travelling into the iceberg meant the Titanic’s starboard section of the hull, just below the ships waterline, was ripped open and 300ft of the ship was now at the mercy of the ocean. As the ship hit the iceberg, Murdock (the guy steering the ship) put the ship in reverse and this caused the ship to slow down. Britannica says that most experts think the ship would’ve stayed afloat if it hit the iceberg head-on rather than the way it did.

As the Titanic hit the iceberg, the ship rocked, but not enough for the crew to think that there was any immediate damage as it grazed the Titanic rather than going straight into it. Nevertheless, the Captain asked the operator to call for help while himself and Thomas Andrews went to see if everything was okay in the lower reaches of the ship. The bow was already beginning to drop and 5 compartments were filling up. So, we’ve got a fifth compartment filling up, that means that there were only 10 left before the entire of the bulkheads were submerged. Andrews determined that there was around an hour and a half left until the entire Titanic was underwater.

Smith ordered the lifeboats to be loaded, but the lifeboats weren’t being filled to capacity. The Captain earlier that day had cancelled the lifeboat drill as the ship was unsinkable, right. The lifeboats were designed to hold 65 people and only 28 people were being loaded in. The crew were unorganized, uneducated and panicking. Smith had forgotten to sound the emergency alarm and many passengers in third class did not realize the ship was sinking until it was far too late and with the maze of hall’s in the Titanic, other passengers just couldn’t find their way out.  

At 12:20am, one of the distress signals was picked up by the Carpathia. The Carpathia was on route, but it was going to take 3 hours or more to get there. The Californian (another ship) was close to the Titanic, but the wireless had been turned off and all other ships were further than the Carpathia.

Women and children were being loaded onto the lifeboats first. This was common sea law back then (even though it had been “bad luck” to have a woman on board for hundreds of years). This law of the sea doesn’t work when people are panicking about dying though, and it turns out a lot of victims were the ones they tried to save first.

The ship luckily (or unluckily) stayed afloat for 3 hours instead of the predicted hour and half. While people were loading onto the lifeboats, husbands and wives were saying their final goodbyes. Children were separated from their parents, and the band were bravely playing on to try and calm the passengers down.  

People were scared, bravery was rife but so was cowardice. They say you never truly face fear until you face death. Some people stayed on the ship like Thomas Andrews, Isador Straus and Ida Straus. Thomas was last seen in the first class smoking room, staring at a painting. Isador refused to take a seat on a lifeboat and Ida refused to leave him, they both went to the cabin and died together [remember that sweet scene in the film with the older couple? This was based off of their actions]. Also, do you remember me mentioning “Molly” Brown earlier? She helped load the lifeboats and didn’t really want to leave the ship, but she was forced to get in the last boat to leave. She begged the crewmen to go back so they could look for survivors, but the crewman refused for fear of the boat being taken down by other survivors in the water. The Captain is rumored to have been helping kids into lifeboats, then after he gave the order of every man for himself, he died at the helm as the ship went down.

The bow was sinking and the stern was rising out of the water. The strain on the midsection was growing. At about 2:20 in the morning of the 15^th of April, with the lights still shining, the Titanic was nearly vertical, half the ship in the ocean and half out; every man for himself had been called by the Captain, the ship lost power and the lights went out and the ships bow broke. It was the first part of the ship to completely sink headfirst (we can assume that Captain Edward Smith, whose remains were never found, was in this part of the ship as it went down), then the stern went under and was ripped apart, causing it to spiral in the sea.

Most people died of exposure to the cold, others refused to leave their family and simply perished with the ship and the Captain and Andrews. Well, they went down with the ship. Around 700 crew members died, as well as 536 third class passengers. Out of 2,229 passengers, only 705 survived.

At about 3am the Carpathia had reached the aftermath. The Californian arrived at about 8am. At about 9am the Carpathia headed for New York and arrived on the 18^th of April.

There were 5 separate inquiries into the sinking, all interviewing different survivors and maritime experts. The general consensus was that it sank due to the 300ft hull-breach, some blamed the lookout for not seeing the iceberg quickly enough and others blamed the captain for cancelling the lifeboat drill that morning. Any way you look at it, it was a dreadful disaster, that shouldn’t have happened.

Theories So, here’s the part where we look at theories. Conspiracy theories about what really happened to the Titanic; if it’s sinking due to hull damage from the fire onboard when it set off or the iceberg story just doesn’t sit right with you.

The Titanic was cursed

Some people believe that the Titanic had a mummified princess on board the ship. The mummy was taken from Egypt and brought to England and was going to her final resting place in America. An American Archaeologist had bought her and was taking her back home with him despite warning from many of his friends. He got on the Titanic and the mummy didn’t like it, so she plagued the ship with misfortune and bad luck from the moment she was on the ship.

As cool as this is, it’s been debunked by many a historian. There are no reports or inventory notes of a mummy being aboard the ship. The so called “unlucky mummy” is actually still here in the UK at the British Museum [remind me to never go there again].

This all stemmed from a passenger called William Stead, who was a journalist and spiritualist, who had reported earlier in the week the Titanic set sail, that there was a mummy causing disaster in London. Another reason comes from some things that Margaret “Molly” Brown had brought on the ship with her. She’d brought some Egyptian artifacts to take back to a museum in Denver once she got back to America. Leading to theories about bringing a cursed item onboard.

No Pope It’s no secret the ship was built in Belfast, Ireland, a Catholic country. This conspiracy is that the ships hull number, 3909 04, looks like “no pope” back-to-front and all the Catholic workers FREAKED OUT, as it was of course bad luck for them to slate religion this way.

Well, this definitely isn’t true. The number was made up by theorists. Harland and Wolff (the gents who built the ship) were protestant and had actually gone on a tirade against their Catholic workers in 1886 and removed them all from their employment. The hull number was 401, the same as the ship yard number and the Board of Trade number was 131, 428.

The U-Boat Other people claim that the Titanic was attacked by a German U-Boat, because of its record breaking and impressive build. People believe that this is possible, as it was only a few years before the first World War. If you’re sad enough to know your ships, like I am, you will know that the Lusitania was a Cunard line ship that was sunk in 1915, off the coast of Ireland by a German U-Boat. This leads many to believe that the Titanic was actually the first passenger boat to be taken down by the Germans, due to some survivors reporting they heard loud explosions and that they saw a unidentified vessel a few miles away.

It was all JP Morgan Rumor has it that JP Morgan sank the Titanic in order to get rid of his rivals. This theory goes off the fact that Morgan was meant to sail on the Titanic, but backed out before it set sail. His main rivals all did indeed die. Jacob Astor was last seen clinging to the side of a raft, Benjamin Guggenheim was never found, but reportedly went to his cabin as the ship was sinking and put a rose in his shirts buttonhole and said “We’ve dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.” Isidor Straus, we know perished with his wife.

So, why did Morgan survive? Who did he pay? How did he get the ship to hit the iceberg?

Suppose we’ll never know.

The Journalists who knew One of the victims of the Titanic, called William Stead, (who was the journalist reporting about the curse of the mummy earlier in our conspiracy list) wrote a short story called “How the Mail Steamer Went Down in Mid Atlantic, by a survivor”. The short talks about an unnamed ocean liner that sinks in the Atlantic. The story follows a sailor called Thompson, who was worrying about the lifeboat shortage, just before the ship collides with a small sailing ship.

The protagonist survives, but the sinking and disruption on deck is similar to that of the Titanic.

The final line written in the book? Well, “This is exactly what might take place and what will take place if the liners are sent to sea short of boats.”

The second one is most probably one of the most famous coincidences in history. “The Wreck of the Titan: or, Futility” was written by Morgan Robertson and follow the story of the Titan, an ocean liner which hits an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinks. The names aren’t the only things the ships have in common.

The Titan was the largest ship, the speed it was travelling when it crashed was the same and both ships were unsinkable. The weirdest bit, is that the Titan also sank on a cold April night.

Titanic? More like Olympic This one is my favourite theory, however, this theory is very long and I would highly recommend looking up videos on this theory to get the full jist.

Some say the Titanic wasn’t the ship that sank on the fateful night, but it was instead her sister ship, the Olympic. They say that the ships were swapped and the ‘Titanic’ was sunk for insurance.

The Olympic was damaged while on its way to New York in 1911 and had to come back to Belfast to be repaired. They say that the Olympic was too damaged to continue with the White Star Line and they switched the two, so they could get rid of the ship.

It’s said that the aim wasn’t to kill anyone (or at least keep casualties to a minimum), and if it would’ve gone the way it was meant to, the ship would’ve sunk slowly and the other ships near it would have been able to get to the ship in time. There’s also some sources that say that more celebrities were meant to sail on the ship, but were told not too. Some believe that JP Morgan was one of those members told not to sail.

Robin Guardiner, who wrote “Titanic: The Ship That Never Sank?” said that the iceberg was in-fact a darkened rescue ship, that was on standby to save them.

I have heard a theory that the Captain, Edward Smith, had been in 3 ship accidents, one of which involved the Olympics reason for having to be repaired in Belfast just before the Titanic’s voyage; I cannot find any information to backup these claims though and I have only found evidence discrediting the accusations.

The only problem (along with the accusations against Captain Smith) is that all numbered items pulled from the Titanic had the “401” construction number. The Olympics was 400.

Some claim that the lettering is coming off of the bow of the Titanic and revealing the Olympic underneath, but again, there is no evidence to prove this.

Experts say that the Titanic will only last about 15 – 20 years more before it completely disintegrates due to the rust eating bacteria.

The Titanic was one of the most luxurious and beautiful ships around. Most of the people aboard were travelling to their new life in America and sadly didn’t get there. The Titanic and her victims will always be remembered.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this blog and I hope you’ve found something out you might not have known about the Titanic. What’s your favourite conspiracy about the sinking?

[On a lighter note, I have a weird phobia of looking at shipwrecks. Finding pictures of the Titanic, at the bottom of the ocean, has been interesting…]